Ondřej Tichý

Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online

The Story of a Dictionary and its Digitization

Fimmtudaginn 9. apríl 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, April 9, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

The Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by Joseph Bosworth and T. N. Toller has been the leading lexicographical resource in the study of Old English since its publication over a century ago. However, for that same period of time it has also proven to be a highly contentious resource and sometimes downright an irritating tool to use. This talk will briefly introduce the history of the Dictionary and it use, but the focus will be squarely on the project of its digitization that has over the years lead to the online application used almost two million times every year at bosworthtoller.com.

The aim of this digitization project has been to create a faithful representation of what the printed Dictionary has to offer and present it freely online for the widest audiences adding new features made possible by its transformation.

The talk will cover the history of the project and the basic methodology of the digitization — from OCR to XML and finally the online app. It will introduce the educational or pedagogical aspects of its development; the tools and standards similar digitization projects may or should use and the follow-up projects that may be encouraged by the adherence to these standards.

Finally, it will also tackle the technical and lexicographical difficulties encountered during the development: such as the structural inconsistency of the Dictionary, the level of fidelity in its digital representation, the disambiguation of some of its data and the reliability of its sources. These are shown to be on one hand common to all similar digitization efforts, but on the other hand often intimately associated with the peculiar history of the Dictionary that may, in its new digital form, finally overcome some of its limitation and after more than 150 years realise its full potential online.

Ondřej Tichý is currently the deputy head of the Department of Linguistics and the head of the Center for Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) in Prague. Among his research interests are historical corpus linguistics, quantitative analysis and digital humanities. He has worked on topics such as lexical and multi-word mortality, quantitative analysis of spelling variation, grammaticalization of countability, quantitative typology, automatic morphological analysis and lemmatization and digital lexicography. He is the author of the online version of the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. He is currently working on a number of digital projects including Lexico-semantic Database of Czech, a database of medieval Czech textual sources in translation, an online tool for visualisation of diachronic change in collocations and LLM benchmarking tools for DH.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.

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